I missed out that in the mid 90s he was chief executive of City & Guilds. I only found out about that at his funeral on Monday. He never talked about himself. You had to ask him quite specific questions to get him to talk about his life, but he never revealed very much. Howeve if you wanted to talk about politics or sport he would happily talk enthusiastically for hours. Football, rugby, motor racing, golf, cricket, were his main interests, but he could probably hold his own talking about most sports. I’m sure that his work has touched a lot of people’s lives. I’m very proud of him for that.
Trouble is, unless you can fly (which we can’t) you ain’t getting away from one of those. They climb, swim and run much, much faster than us. Canny sense of smell too…
Brown Bears can run at 30 -35 mph (50 feet per second) and keep it up for about 2 miles. So if it sees you a mile away, and its not happy, its on you before you know it. Usain Bolt could run at 27mph for 100m on a track. In the water a bear swims at 5mph, just faster than Micheal Phelps and can do it all day long...
All that with the added bonus of them not killing you outright and then eating but rather tearing off bits off you until you bleed out.
In 1986 I was on an exchange with the US army in Fort Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania. When we first went out into the training area we were warned there were two types of bears in the area, Brown bears and Grizzly bears. If we spotted a bear in order to tell them apart we should climb a tree. If it was a brown bear it would climb the tree and kill us. If it was a Grizzly it would push the tree over, and kill us.
RIP to all those that perished on the plane crash in Kazakhstan today. I am not quite sure how to say it certainly was no bird strike nor accident without disrespect to this thread.
